by W. Green
Zak looked at Ethan. He too was smiling, but to Zak he had the look of man who wanted to really goose the goose.
A.C. Currant held a clipboard in front of him and checked the notebook chart. “OK, kids. I’ve got a to-do list that won’t quit. We’ve really got to study the customs, clothes, clichés, and citizens of Chicago in 1963. We’ll need old money. We’ll need old technology. We need to train on the TimeTravelle. We’ve got mucho work to do.”
Ethan ran up the ramp of the TimeTravelle device, stood on a jump pad and spun around, facing his audience. “Will this baby work, Doc?”
Currant smiled with a boyish grin. “Sonny boy—we will have the time of our lives.”
“Right. But have you time-traveled with it?”
Currant seemed flustered. “Well. Technically, no. But it has performed perfectly for physical transfer, and the computer runs for time travel have gone like clockwork. No pun intended.” Currant chuckled at the sound of his own words. “I’m certain it will work perfectly. After all, I designed it.” He smiled broadly and extended his hands palms up as if to end the discussion.
“So what you’re saying is that it’s untested and the four of us are test dummies?”
“Well, I would call us all ‘pioneers’…”
Ethan sucked in deeply and then exhaled. “OK, Doc. It’s your funeral too.”
“Please, Ethan. Skip the melodrama. It will work. And remember, I was alive in ’63. The TimeTravelle will get us there. I’ll keep us from making stupid mistakes. Dufour will stay here and monitor The History for any disruptions. You can do your junior detective digging. Your sister can worry, and Zak can eat some of the finest fast food ever cooked in the best greasy spoons in Chicago. This will be fun, my friends. This will be a gas.”
LOG of Zak Newman
June 26, 2028: 22:13
I have been told my handwriting is very legible, as it should be, since I have been practicing this skill my entire life. In a way, I am a 21st-century monk—I can make my pen produce writing on paper, which, like the typical monk’s efforts in the Middle Ages, can be read only by a small minority of the populace. For me, it is simple to decipher the swirls, dots, and slashes that form the letters, words, and sentences. But for most, such writing looks as quaint as Chinese sinographs—very interesting but meaningless. I can thank my mother (the wonderful surrogate provided by the A.W. beta program) for this skill. She started my longhand career when I was two years old. How she knew what was coming I’ll never know. But she knew and I was given this unique skill. Thanks to her, I can write a log in private. My thoughts are mine to myself—so long as I successfully keep the log hidden from MOM. She, our government within the government, has, of course, forbidden the recording of these thoughts. It’s probably verboten just to think them, but this log is now an unimportant and minor transgression since we have decided to time-travel to the past using A.C. Currant’s astounding device. How he can keep that thing a secret while every written, spoken, or imagined idea of every person in the country is captured, cataloged, copied, and coded I will never know—but he is a certified genius, or so he says. We’ll find out how smart he really is once we begin our voyage across time.
I can’t say enough bad things about MOM—she has location-revealing nano-implants delivered into the bloodstreams of unsuspecting children when they are immunized against disease; mind-control devices force-feeding mental poison to the masses; monitoring cameras and microphones in every inch of public space; police armed with sound detectors able to listen in to “private conversations” from a half-kilometer distance; and sensing devices including X-ray machines in every police cruiser that identify every license number, every occupant, and everything and anything in a person’s vehicle. MOM is like a nasty, nosy dog with very bad breath—totally invasive, always in your face, everywhere and nowhere, sniffing about without reason—just an annoying pest that will never leave you alone. She always claims to be working in everyone’s best interest, but nobody wants her and nobody likes her—she’s a bitch. I’ve been told that many years ago people and politicians actually discussed the limits of MOM. Some suggested that a government’s role should be to maintain a free flow of ideas and accomplishments by protecting the people from outsiders or insiders who would interfere with the American Dream, as it was then called. But after a while, MOM poked her wet nose into everybody’s life—according to her, to help “them” because they could not possibly help themselves. She became nosier and nosier, and she kept improving her senses of smell and memory until, like a good coon dog, she could even identify a person with an unwanted idea from her doghouse on the moon. She created IfraGuard, a stoolie program that allowed children to rat on their parents. Eventually people stopped talking about ideas that MOM might not find acceptable. People speculate that within the last few years she has perfected her ability to read minds at will from a distance just to verify that no one is contemplating doing anything, which would upset her plans. This long-distance mind reading could be just a wild rumor, but I notice more people humming to themselves as they walk about in public Maybe they’re trying to stifle their thoughts. After all, if you don’t have a thought, it can’t be read. As A.C. said so boldly—in the safety of his underground bunker: “Screw MOM!” I hope her mind-reading machine isn’t focused on me right now. She wouldn’t like my misty misgivings about life in America in year 2028—nor my longing to taste the freedoms of the past via the TimeTravelle device. Everyone has reasons for going back in time. A.C. wants to prove his genius and Ethan wants to solve the mystery of JFK’s death. I think Emma wants to keep Ethan out of trouble and maybe—just maybe—straighten out this screwed-up world we live in by gently tweaking the past. And for me, MOM has made life thoroughly boring, predictable, and confining. I just want to swim naked in the wild river of time.
End 06-26-28
-Chapter 2-
Creating a Legend
Ethan’s eyes scanned the interior of the refrigerator, finally resting upon the jar of real strawberry preserves that his father had brought home from his recent travels. He loved the real rather than the artificial. The combination of the preserves over some rough bread and a cup of hot coffee provided him a satisfying breakfast. It was a particularly quiet morning late in June. A clear day, the low morning sun cut through the kitchen windows and reflected brightly off the crisp white tile floor. He mulled over the texture and taste of his toast as he starred blankly at the small quiet pond and two morning ducks drifting in the blue water. Tiny birds flitted about the tree branches of the surrounding still misty woods. His mind drifted like those ducks. Even though he was seventeen, his father still provided treats, like the strawberry preserves, as if he were a little boy. Ethan warmed to this thought as he downed the last bite. The motorized stair chair sounded the arrival of his father, Warren Wright. He assumed it would be at least a couple of hours before Emma made her morning appearance. Since school let out for summer break she had gone back to her natural sleeping mode—late to bed, late to rise. “Morning, Dad,” chirped Ethan. “Looks like a good one, doesn’t it?”
His father rolled into the kitchen. A skilled operator of the latest gyromobe device, he brought the machine to a neat stop in front of the coffee station. Then, he activated the delivery of caffeine by pushing his screen icon, a tiger, which immediately yielded one large mug of steaming black coffee. With his first sip, he sighed. “Good stuff. Can’t live without it.”
“You got me hooked,” said Ethan. “Coffee,” he sipped, “is every detective’s elixir.” He smiled. “How you feeling today, Dad?”
His father still retained solid masculine looks, black hair smattered with gray, and one of the few moustaches in the country. His upper body was muscular, but his lower body was a withered wisp. Wright looked up from his cup, “Not bad—not bad at all—better than dead,” he muttered, almost to himself. He brushed back his hair with his free hand and shook his head gently side to side.
Sensing his father’s angst, E
than thought about the terrible night five years ago when the news arrived that the detective had been wounded by a bullet to his lower back. He endured a series of complex surgeries and only his powerful will to live allowed him to survive what should have been a deathblow. Ironically, the shot that paralyzed him came from an off-duty policeman who just happened by at the moment Warren Wright was about to capture two very desperate criminals. The old cop was trying to help when one of the men pulled a gun. In response, the cop fired several shots. One found its mark in the bad guy, the other hit the detective. This tragedy appeared to be, at least in the public’s view of Warren Wright, only a bump in the road of his spectacular career as an investigator. But his field investigations were over now. gyromobe-bound, he contented himself with ideation, conceptual thinking, and data analysis for the government’s domestic security division. His days of working out there were long gone, and, in fact, as he often remarked, the days of private super-sleuths were dead and gone too—dead as his limp legs.
“We’re leaving in two days,” said Ethan.
“Are you ready?”
“Well, thanks to you, we got to use the talent of one of the finest forgers in the country…”
“Retired forger.”
“Right. I know Longwell served his time and I know he was doing us a favor because you asked him to. Anyway, he did a great job on the documents. A ton of research. Take a look at these.” Ethan grabbed a portfolio off the kitchen counter and retrieved a passel of documents. He handed them to his father one by one. “Driver’s license, library card, Social Security card…”
“Hey, I remember these,” his father said with a smile. “These things actually paid off for a while until the government gave up the pretense in 2015. Thankfully your grandmother got a few bucks out of it before it went bust.”
“Right. But this will be hot stuff in 1963. Here. Check it out. It’s a membership card for Emma—the Frankie Avalon Fan Club. He was a singer.”
“Don’t remember him. Must have been something though. Fan club?” Wright shook his head.
“We’ve got bus passes and school IDs for Emma, Zak, and me. We’re using ‘Springfield Heights High School’—not ‘Mystic Heights’—to conceal our true residence. Longwell created a number of pieces for Dr. Currant also—Rotary Club. Diner’s Club. This is the best—a voter’s card. Now that’s something I’ve never seen before. Apparently, people could vote if they had this piece of cardboard.”
“Well, at least they thought they were doing something by voting,” said his father. “We haven’t had an election based on popular vote since 2016. You were just five years old then—a little too young play the game. After that fiasco of an election, they gave up and instituted the VIP—voter implant project—nobody could vote without the implant. Cut down on the voter fraud. Cut down on the voters too. Anyone with half a brain and enough money to support themselves took a pass. The rest are the electorate. As if it mattered. At least they make it look good every four years. They vote and they get their public aid and nobody tells them who to vote for—the computer sorts through that process.”
“That’s why I thought this card was so neat,” said Ethan. “All the adults had them in 1960. And took them very seriously. They voted and their votes must have counted. Not like today. From what I read, Kennedy was a dark horse but he still got elected.”
“Right. That was great until somebody blasted his head off. That’s the way they did it in the old days. Wrong guy gets elected, thinks he has the power of the people, and boom—off with his head.”
Just then Emma waltzed into the kitchen, barefoot with tussled hair. She wore a red terry robe with her name emblazoned across the back like a professional athlete. “Let me guess—JFK. Right?” she said as she too began to dig about in the refrigerator.
“You’re up early,” said Ethan.
She ignored his comment. “Juice and a banana. ‘Breakfast of Champions’.”
Ethan smiled and replied, “Well, I see you have done your 1963 homework.”
Warren Wright looked puzzled.
“Wheaties. Everyone ate them for breakfast in 1963,” she said. “They don’t sell them anymore, of course.” She shrugged her shoulders. “Heck, they don’t sell much boxed cereal at all now. I guess that ended when the milk supply went south. Too much radioactivity per glass, right, Dad?”
“Right. There was a flurry of big quakes that destroyed one nuclear plant too many. Just another thing. Too bad, I really enjoyed a glass of milk and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich when I was young. But you are correct, my little buttercup, once the cow milk turned into nuke juice, that piece of farming history died—along with thousands of people and a whole lot of cows.”
“So, Sis, are you ready for the big road trip?”
“Stop that!” she sputtered.
“What?”
“Don’t call me Sis.”
“Come on, Sis…”
Emma ignored her brother and turned to face her father. “Dad. Make him stop. I mean it.”
Warren Wright looked up at Ethan and spoke, his voice lowered, “Ethan. Enough is enough. You two have a rough month ahead of you. You better make amends.”
Ethan leaned over and gave Emma a noisy kiss on the back of her head. “I’m sorry, Si…”
She turned around and glared at him.
“Emma,” he said. “No more ‘Sis’—at least while we’re time-traveling.”
She relaxed and smiled. “OK. Truce. Little brother.”
Ethan nodded. “Fifteen minutes older, my dear twin.”
“Right, and years wiser.”
Mr. Wright watched the sibling settlement with apparent amusement. Then Ethan saw him focus his view on the window. He turned back and locked in on Emma first, then Ethan. They both sensed the change in his attitude. Wright refilled his coffee cup and asked the two to follow him. Crossing the dining room, they entered the study located in the center of the house. Without any windows and with walls paneled in solid oak, Ethan always thought it felt like the inside of a wine barrel. He knew those walls were lined with lead sheets, Kevlar, soundproofing, and electronic neutralizing equipment that was activated the moment someone entered the room. It was the only secure, safe, isolated room in the house. In fact, it was purposely constructed as a safe room. His father asked him to close the two sequentially operating doors. Swinging in the heavy outer door, then the equally ponderous inner door, Ethan’s eyes settled on his father. He knew that look. His father was very concerned about something. “What’s up, Dad?”
“I don’t want you to speak about time travel. The topic is potentially dangerous. You and I know that the government has unofficially banned the use of time-travel devices. Over the past ten years they’ve confiscated and destroyed many machines.” He tightened his face. “I saw a bee outside our kitchen window.”
“A bee?” questioned Emma. “Like a honey bee?”
“No, Emma,” said Ethan, “a bee like a government mini-drone.” He looked back at his father. “You sure, Dad?”
His father nodded. “Yeah. It was one of those little flying snoop machines. You can never tell what they’re up to. Maybe it was just passing by. But it did hover for a few seconds in the window while you two were fussing over Emma’s nickname. I’m concerned.”
“What,” said Emma, “do you think they know that we’re going ‘back door’?”
Mr. Wright steepled his hands in front of him and tapped his fingers together. “You know—I have resources inside and outside the government. I have no information to speak of. I just know how things work. The government will do anything to put an end to time travel. They’re so afraid of upsetting their apple cart of control that they will overcorrect in this area.”
“So?” asked Ethan.
“So. Don’t raise the topic even between yourselves—even in the privacy of this house. Don’t assume anything. Just be cautious. You’ll be on your way in two days, and while you are gone I’ll be watching your files. But
you must be careful on your trip. Don’t do anything that will change history. They have ways of detecting changes—even relatively small ones. Dr. Currant has assured me that his device is totally isolated and is designed to create the minimum backwash in operation. He doesn’t believe anyone has or will detect its use.”
“Dad, he told us there wouldn’t be any trouble.” Emma spoke surely, but Ethan detected some doubt in her voice.
“I know. I had a long talk with him. I agree. Things will be fine if you walk lightly on the path of time and don’t wander into the woods stirring up the animals. Just observe. Aside from Ethan’s quest to be at the scene of the JFK crime, you should have a great time living in 1963. For one thing, there won’t be any bees.”
“Just honey and bumble,” offered Emma.
“And spelling,” said Ethan with a smile.
“R-i-g-h-t,” said Warren Wright as spun the gyromobe and rolled over to his desk. “Now I have work to do and you two have to start packing.”
The twins left their father and dashed upstairs. In Emma’s room they spread out the clothes they had purchased at secondhand shops. Emma grabbed an outfit and said, “I’m going to change into this one. You try out one of yours and I’ll meet you in the hall for a fashion show.”
Ethan scooped up a pair of chinos, a madras shirt, argyle socks, and a pair of penny loafers and left the room. In a few minutes they regrouped in front of a large mirror in the stair hallway outside their rooms.
Emma, wearing a white blouse with a Peter Pan collar, a cardigan sweater, a schoolmarm skirt, and white cotton socks with white tennis shoes, viewed herself in the mirror. She held a book tucked under her arm as a prop. “I’m not sure about this look. What do you think?”
“Well, I guess you look like those old yearbook photos. But there’s something out of place.” He thought for a moment. “Your socks.”
